Dispatches from DrupalCon Day Three

Day 3 got underway with many if not all of the attendees roaming the convention center with a painfully large amount of new information rattling around their heads. The sheer volume of information so far exceeds brain capacity, most of us were drained and yet eager to push more information around.

The keynote was by Luke Wroblewski and focused on mobile first development. This was not a highlight for the day, not because the content was poor, but because the rest of the day’s sessions were so great.

My first session of today was Directions For Drupal Core presented by Dries Buytaert. Dries as the founder and creator of Drupal is the focus of some of the best and most heated discussions. The talk was brief and spoke to 3 directions for D8 Core.

Big Core: Adding more into Core for a better out of the box experience. This complicates matters.

Small Core: Makes the core more streamlined and focused

Lieutenant Core: Would add initiative leaders on a new branch of core with new features.

The presentation lasted only about 15 minutes, followed by a Q&A session. The Q&A is what made this memorable. Larry Garfield, known to many in the Drupal community as Crell, had some very confrontational and terse words for Dries. This lead to an incredible conversation with some of the best and brightest bantering back-and-forth about the future of Drupal.

Drush 5!!!

This is where it got nerdy and great. Drush is a command line/scripting interface for Drupal. Drush is complex and incredibly powerful. The Drush 5 release is incredible and I can honestly say I only understood/retained about 2/3rds of the presentation.

My bullet points of the improvements discussed are (Warning, this is technical and expects some chops):

Shell aliases: Can be used by anyone on the server

‘noncore’ -> ‘pm-list —no-core’

‘pulldb’ -> ‘!git pull && drush updb’

Drush is now Windows compatible and there is a full Windows installer sponsored by Microsoft